What you need to know about the arrival of Russian state television in Bosnia and Herzegovina

When in December of last year Darinka Petrović, then a journalist for Alternative Television, told Putin during his annual press conference that there are no Russian media in Bosnia and Herzegovina, he replied that he would contact his colleagues who would try to do something.

The Serbian-language RT channel still does not exist, but editor Margarita Simonyan has fulfilled her promise to bring the Russian media closer to the journalist Petrović. Thus, in October 2024, this journalist announced on her Facebook profile that she had become close to Russian television, that is, that she had become an employee of RT Balkan. At the end of that month, her first texts were published on RT's Balkan web service.

At the beginning of November, journalist Anđelka Marković joined her in preparing these contents. Since then, the two of them have published more than 40 different articles, which deal with daily politics and topics from culture and religion.

Their texts promote the work of Russian institutions and political representatives, as well as their cooperation with political structures in the Republika Srpska and entity president Milorad Dodik.

They often spread an anti-Western feeling in the texts, in which NATO, the EU, the high representative and the American ambassador to Bosnia and Herzegovina are presented as undesirable or enemies of the RS, while Russia is presented as a great ally. Some of the articles dealt with topics about convicted war criminals, and were used for a new denial of the genocide in Srebrenica, while others denied the existence of BiH, which was called a "quasi-state under a protectorate" and a "patient on a ventilator."

Neither of these two journalists responded to Detektor's inquiry.

Putin said he would contact Oleg Borisovich, the director of the All-Russian State Television and Broadcasting Company (VGTRK), who is under sanctions by most Western countries on charges that he participated in the destruction of independent media in Russia, but also for promoting disinformation that strengthened the Putin regime. .

Only a day later, Margarita Simonyan, the editor-in-chief of the Russian state television RT, which is also under sanctions from Western countries for its participation in the spread of pro-government propaganda, announced that next year it will begin broadcasting programs in the Serbian language and that the Russian side will make an effort to Petrović "has everything she needs in her home to be able to watch Russian television".

Experts believe that RT's correspondence could threaten BiH's European path.

 

Nikola Burazer, executive director of the European Western Balkans (EWB) portal, a Serbian media outlet dedicated to monitoring the process of integration of the Western Balkan countries into the European Union, states that Russian state media work to promote Russia itself, but also serve as an instrument of Russian foreign policy, and to in the Western Balkans, the primary interest is preventing Euro-Atlantic integration and stabilization of the region.

"Given how much BiH, as a post-conflict area, is faced with numerous open wounds, dominantly nationalist rhetoric and inter-ethnic disagreements that hinder the very functioning of the state, we can assume that the goal of the Russian media in this country will be to take advantage of these circumstances, to additionally contribute to its destabilization", explains Burazer.

 

Promise fulfilled

About ten months after the start of Russia's invasion of Ukraine, RT Balkan was opened, whose news, content, propaganda and disinformation were often broadcast by some media from Republika Srpska.

Lamija Silajdžić, a professor at the Department of Communication at the Faculty of Political Sciences in Sarajevo, notes that those earlier contents often promoted the denial of facts about the genocide in Srebrenica or glorified war criminals. She warns that the more active activity of such a media in Bosnia and Herzegovina could be an additional disintegrating factor.

"The long-term effects of disinformation, propaganda and manipulative media coverage of any media is the 'cementing' of divisions in society, and the strengthening of information filter bubbles in which the public in BiH find themselves," emphasizes Silajdžić.

In addition to female journalists who have been writing news from Republika Srpska for more than a month, the first correspondent of a Russian media in BiH has started looking for offices, journalists from Banja Luka told Detektor, including Siniša Vukelic, editor of the Capital portal, which recently published the information as RT plans to open a correspondent office in this city by the end of 2024.

"I don't know if they have already found it, but I know that they were looking for a space where the journalists and, I assume, the camera crew and everything necessary for a serious correspondence will be housed," adds Vukelic.

Members of the journalistic community also state that, in addition to two female journalists, RT's correspondent team in this city is joined by two videographers, who will participate together in the creation of Russian state television programs in the Serbian language.

Marković, a former journalist for N1 and Una television, told the Detektor journalist to contact their editorial office in Belgrade, whose public relations team can provide answers to questions about correspondence, and that she cannot make statements without the company's permission.

After one call and several e-mails exchanged with RT's representative office in Belgrade, they did not answer the questions. Instead, they asked for patience.

"All the information will be known soon," said the editorial office of RT Balkan.

 

Vukelic says that he is surprised that the Russian state has not opened this kind of correspondence earlier, considering the messages and attitudes of the authorities in the RS, as well as the close contacts between Dodik and Putin.

"Probably it was not opened before because there was no need to spend money on it because the authorities and media in the RS, which are under the control of the SNSD, voluntarily and free of charge promoted exactly that cooperation and positions represented by the Russian Federation," explains Vukelic.

 

The arrival of the Russian media is a danger for the European road

The Russian television network RT has been under EU sanctions since February 2022, due to the systematic manipulation of information and disinformation spread through this medium. Apart from them, sanctions were imposed on this medium by Canada and the United States of America.

The content of RT and Sputnik, another Russian state media for EU users, was blocked by "Meta" and TikTok.

The YouTube platform went a step further, globally blocking all Russian-funded media.

So far, BiH has not joined any package of sanctions against Russia and Russian companies due to the invasion of Ukraine and has become one of the rare places in Europe where Russian media can actively spread their influence.

The international organization "Reporters without Borders" previously called on the EU and its members to put pressure on Serbia because it allows the work of RT Balkan, whose influence, apart from Serbia, is spreading in Montenegro and Bosnia and Herzegovina. Pavol Szalai, the head of the office for the Balkans of this organization, expresses concern about the opening of the RT correspondent in our country, but also about the fact that all the details of this expansion are hidden for now.

"It is possible that the announcements about RT's plans themselves are intended to be part of the Kremlin's information war, with the aim of causing confusion. Spreading propaganda about spreading propaganda," says Szalai for Detektor.

He warns that the opening of RT's correspondence could threaten BiH's European path, which is why he hopes that the authorities in BiH will resort to legal solutions to prevent the spread of Russian propaganda.

"Such propaganda threatens citizens' rights to truthful information, described in the European Law on Freedom of the Media. We want the rights of BiH citizens to be equal to the rights of EU citizens, and banning the spread of war propaganda is even more important in a country that went through the horrors of war 30 years ago," adds Szalai.

Nikola Burazer's organization previously analyzed the influence of Russian state media in Serbia and their expansion in BiH, which is why it concludes that such media are focused on encouraging Serbian nationalism, demonizing the West and supporting the government when it is under pressure from the opposition. He expects similar phenomena in Bosnia and Herzegovina, with the support of the RS and

the narratives of the authorities of this entity, which can additionally threaten Bosnia and Herzegovina's path towards the EU, which is already burdened with numerous problems.

"Any contribution to destabilization, the growth of nationalism and inter-ethnic mistrust indirectly damages the European path of Bosnia and Herzegovina, as well as the entire region. All of this would have happened without Russian influence, but it is clearly aimed at further harming these processes," adds Burazer.

Vukelic believes that the arrival of RT in Bosnia and Herzegovina will not change much the atmosphere and environment in the RS, given that the society is already used to hearing only one side of the story through the existing media.

"They will simply be absorbed into a number of media that already exist there, but it is certainly indicative because the RS is a relatively small community in the world framework and we do not see why such a large, global television station like RT would be interested in that, unless there are some political reasons", believes Vukelic.

Interlocutors of Detektor say that there should be some measure by which the information space in BiH would be more protected, especially from foreign malignant influences, misinformation and fake news, to which citizens are increasingly exposed.

"We need a comprehensive approach - cooperation of governmental and non-governmental bodies, regulators, self-regulators, media and media researchers, in order to adequately respond to the challenges of the digital space, because it seems that the greatest number of challenges come through it," concludes Silajdžić.